Protecting Children From Sex Abuse

Prevention of child sexual abuse should be a major public health initiative. If it were a higher priority, identifying children at risk could be done in pediatrician’s offices and emergency rooms. Risk factors include neglect and psychological mistreatment.

Mandatory reporting of child abuse is a legal obligation by health care professionals; other forms of violence that include children should be illegal but are not. Domestic violence, witnessed by children, is a common antecedent to other forms of abuse. However, it frequently goes unreported because the abused person (most often a woman) does not report the abuse. Another implication for child sexual abuse is sex trafficking. The average age of induction into sex trafficking in the United States is 13. Most commonly, the victims have a history of childhood sexual abuse.

It’s time for compulsory parenting education at every birth and for increased training of health care professionals for identification and monitoring of those at risk — time, in other words, to begin protecting our children.

VIVIAN B. PENDER

New York

The writer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the course director of the webinar “Human Trafficking: Training Healthcare for Policy and Prevention” at Weill Cornell Medical College.

To the Editor:

I applaud Charles M. Blow for using two high-profile cases to highlight the alarming prevalence and circumstances surrounding childhood sexual abuse.

I also agree with him that it should not be “a political issue.” Sadly, however, it is: A majority of our states have been unable or unwilling to reform their statutes of limitation to provide most child sex abuse victims meaningful access to justice in the courts of law.

Reformation efforts in dozens of states have been repeatedly blocked by legislators influenced by predominantly religious special interest groups (Catholic and Latter-day Saints bishops and Jewish rabbis, among them) and occasionally secular groups (for example, some state American Civil Liberties Union affiliates have opposed reform for the criminal statutes of limitation). The four states most stuck in the political quagmire that disables victims’ access to justice are Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi and New York. This is political pandering, plain and simple.

We need to stop playing politics with child sex abuse victims and eliminate the impediments to prosecution and civil lawsuits for this horrific crime.